Gordon Brown scored a significant, morale-boosting diplomatic victory over French president Nicolas Sarkozy last night when Downing Street announced that he will be the first EU leader to meet President Barack Obama at the White House.

After weeks of behind-the-scenes lobbying by the French and British governments, Number 10 revealed that the prime minister had pipped his French rival to the post, securing an audience with the president on 3 March. British officials stressed that the meeting was proof that the "special relationship" between Britain and the US remained as strong as ever.

Privately, there was delight at Number 10 that Brown, who is struggling in the opinion polls as the economy goes from bad to worse, had got one over his French rival and would have a chance to raise his profile as a world leader alongside the new president.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said in a statement that Britain and the US "share a special partnership, and the president looks forward to working closely with the prime minister to address common global challenges".

The two leaders will discuss the G20 summit in London on 2 April as well as the upcoming Nato summit, in particular Obama's call for a new strategy in Afghanistan. After the president announced the deployment last week of an additional 17,000 troops, discussions are likely to focus on how to persuade other Nato members to share more of the burden of the Afghanistan operation.

The announcement of the visit follows news that the United States has agreed to release Binyam Mohamed, a British resident held at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp for the past five years, without charge.

On the economy, Brown will be keen to get the backing of the president for his plans to increase the funding of the International Monetary Fund and to speed up a review that would give China and India clearer voting rights inside the IMF.

Brown also wants to give the G20 a permanent secretariat as part of moves to increase the effectiveness of international economic co-operation.

Sarkozy infuriated Brown - and fuelled British determination to get to the White House first - when he attacked elements of the prime minister's plan to kick-start the British economy through tax cuts.

Referring to his decision in last November's pre-Budget report to reduce VAT from 17.5 to 15%, Sarkozy said: "Cutting VAT by two points doesn't incite people to buy if they are terrified about their futures. That will bring them nothing. If anything, consumption in Britain has gone down."

He insisted that he would not be imitating the British government's "mistakes". In another sideswipe, Sarkozy said the UK government was running up so much debt that it could "ruin the country" because the borrowed money was not being invested in assets but in "operating costs".

Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, is also understood to have been lobbying hard for the first meeting with the president in order to show that US-German relations have recovered fully since the Bush era, when the Iraq war caused serious tensions.

Brown previously met Obama when he was still a candidate for the presidency, in both Washington and London.